Soldiers and innocence lost

Sunday

Jun 30, 2013 at 12:01 AM

I was too young to understand it all in May 1968, as our sixth-grade class filed into the yellow school bus for the nearly three-hour ride to Gettysburg.

I was 10 then. The only war I was intimately aware of was the one in the American League, where my Red Sox were sinking fast. My world revolved around the Beatles, the space race, Strat-O-Matic, Little League baseball and which .220 hitter I should clothespin to the spokes of my bike to make it rev like a Harley.

Outside the protective shell of my safe, suburban youth, the real world was exploding. The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered a month earlier, and RFK would meet the same fate as the civil rights leader a few weeks later. Politically and racially motivated riots burned across an America tearing at the seams.

The Vietnam War was at its zenith that year, as 350 Americans were dying in combat each week. About 40,000 more were being drafted each month, with the sons of three of our neighbors among them.

Among the lucky ones was 21-year-old George W. Bush. Just two weeks before he was to graduate from Yale in May and lose his student draft deferment, he was accepted into the Texas National Guard as an airman despite having scored only 25 percent on a pilot aptitude test, the lowest acceptable grade. His father was a Texas congressman at the time. It was a prime example of the real world, which I was too young to understand.

But as my classmates and I stepped off that school bus when it rolled to a stop at Gettysburg, my protective shell cracked. For the first time in my young life, I became aware of real life in stark detail, of politics and life and death and consequences. It has been 45 years since our class trip to Gettysburg, but it has stayed with me.

Inside the entrance of the museum was a statue of a Rebel soldier. The detail in his face and eyes was remarkable, rendering him almost lifelike. And then we found out why, as he leaped at us and yelled, “Boo!”

However, there was nothing funny about the rest of our visit. We gathered inside a large room and around a 30-foot-square, 12-ton, steel-and-plaster topographical map that rested on the floor. The map used colored lights to illustrate troop movements in and around Gettysburg.

The Battle of Gettysburg was considered the turning point of the Union’s fight against the Confederacy in the Civil War in 1863. A narrator explained each day of the battle, its outcome, and how the 8,000 lives were lost and 50,000 wounded in the course of the three-day conflict.

We watched and listened. Slowly, our innocence was peeled away. When our group made its way to the battlefield, even more layers were exposed. The wind rustling the leaves on the sunny May afternoon was about the only sound I can recall other than intermittent sobbing by some adult visitors.

A bunch of wide-eyed 11-year-olds stared at the rows and rows of tablet-shaped headstones of the war dead. We were not watching a film in class or perusing photos from an old history book; we were standing where history was made. This was Dealey Plaza, and we were standing on the grassy knoll after the motorcade sped past.

The old electric map, just 5 years old when we were there, is gone now, purchased in September by a businessman for $14,010. He plans to restore and display it in his hometown of Hanover, near Gettysburg, to help with tourism.

But the memories of standing before the graves of the fallen in that field of honor remain. And this week, as we commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg, The Intelligencer and the Bucks County Courier Times will present a series of local and national stories about the historic battle. I will read them and recall the day I stood on the soil of history.

Where brave men, as well as my innocence, were lost.

Phil Gianficaro can be reached at 215-345-3078, pgianficaro@phillyburbs.com or @philgianficaro on Twitter.

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